John Bolton’s appointment does not require confirmation by Congress.
Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters

John Bolton, Donald Trump’s latest choice as national security adviser, belongs to a band of Washington armchair warriors who are rarely happier than when sending other people’s children to die in foreign wars. Like his former Iraq comrades-in-arms, George W Bush and Dick Cheney, and his bellicose new White House boss, Bolton avoided military service in Vietnam as a young man. But he is no peacenik. Far from it. Bolton the conservative arch-hawk has become infamous over the years as a reckless advocate of pre-emptive, interventionist military action in pursuit of what he perceives to be America’s interests.

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Despite the calamitous post-9/11 consequences of his neoconservative ideology, arrogant unilateralism and America First nationalism, Bolton has never acknowledged error. He continues, for example, to argue for forcible regime change in Iran and North Korea. Stuck in a unipolar quagmire of his own intellectual making, the louder he shouts, the deeper he sinks. The world has changed since 2003, but he hasn’t. As the New York Times declared last week, Bolton is a truly dangerous man. A worse choice as the US president’s senior adviser on global security affairs is hard to imagine.

Bolton’s appointment to this pivotal post does not require confirmation by Congress – another instance of how, under Trump, America’s lauded constitutional checks and balances are proving less than effective. And it comes at a particularly sensitive moment. It is unlikely that the promised summit between Trump and Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s dictator, will produce anything more than a grandstanding opportunity for the president. But thanks to South Korea’s efforts, this willingness to talk nevertheless represents a welcome shift away from last year’s nuclear brinkmanship. Yet Bolton, whose job it will be to make the meeting a success, has already dismissed it as a waste of time. He argued only last month that an American first strike – the so-called bloody nose option – would be a “perfectly legitimate” response to Kim’s weapons build-up.

A probable scenario now is that the US side will make demands it knows Kim cannot accept, such as halting his nuclear weapons programme and unilaterally disarming, and will then blame Pyongyang for the ensuing failure. “You see, we tried,” Bolton will say. “So now there is no alternative to bombing.”

It would be good to be wrong about this. We hope we are. But as Iraqis know to their cost, Bolton is nothing if not consistent in his aggressive instincts. The next big target may be Iran, not North Korea. Trump seems certain to repudiate the 2015 multinational treaty curbing Iran’s nuclear capabilities when it is next reviewed in May. The reimposition of US sanctions on Tehran, enthusiastically supported by Bolton, will unleash a chain reaction of perilous consequences across the Middle East that, in a worst case, could expand the Syrian conflict into an uncontainable regional war. Israel’s rightwing leadership, beloved of Trump, gives every appearance of itching for a fight with Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese ally, which it accuses of stockpiling advanced missiles. The Israeli air force recently clashed inside Syria with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. More is to come; Israel believes Tehran is intent on hostile encirclement.

In Iran itself, hardline clerics who denounce Bolton as a “sponsor of terrorism” may privately be content to see the gloves come off with Israel and its US and Saudi allies. So, too, may Palestinians ghettoised in Gaza. Perhaps the Middle East was ever a powder keg. But by picking Bolton, and appointing Mike Pompeo, another pro-Israel hawk, as secretary of state, Trump has lit the blue touchpaper.

Bolton’s confrontational instincts extend to China and Russia policy. He has a history, meanwhile, of disrespecting America’s allies and undermining international cooperative institutions such as the United Nations. All this may suit Trump’s blinkered, bombastic nationalist-protectionist agenda. But it bodes ill for the world at large.